From: "Nathan Newman" <nathanne at nathannewman.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: Brown largely irrelevant to Civil Rights Movement (Re: [lbo-talk] Re:
Sexuality Under Seige, or What Else is New? Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 10:27:43 -0400
----- Original Message -----
From: andie nachgeborenen
>Actually a pretty good case could be made that it was Brown v. Board of
>Education (1954) that was the trigger for the development of the civil rights
>movement, as the culmination of a decades-long legal battle waged by
>the NAACP LDF.
Yeah-- that's the standard lawyers story. It ignores all the mobilization before and during world war II to demand the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission-- thereby desegregating a large part of defense contractors for the government and creating jobs for a whole new emerging middle class.
It ignores the mobilization in the 1940s that led to the House voting repeatedly to ban the poll tax in the South, only being defeated by filibusters in the Senate.
It ignores the mobilization that led to the army being desegregated by Truman and the civil rights plank being adopted by the Democrats in 1948, leading the "Dixiecrats" to walk out of that Convention.
As for Brown v. Board sparking the Montgomery boycott or the later mass mobilizations around the South (apparently having a nearly decade long causal spark), many other historians of the civil rights movement point to multiple, and even stronger causes. For pure shock to the black community and anger that got them moving, almost nothing matched the Emmett Till killing. The other part of the story-- prosaic as it sounds -- is that the migration of blacks from the south to the north, where they could vote, was building up greater and greater pressure for national leaders to act. This meant that agitation in the South would actually translate into immediate propaganda tools for activists to pressure Congress and the President.
Gerald Rosenberg in his book, The Hollow Hope, has whole chapters debunking the idea that Brown was very important, either in its substantive results until Congress took action, or in sparking a social uprising. As he writes, "In terms of judicial effects, then, Brown and its progeny stand for the proposition that courts are impotent to produce significant social reform."
As for its cultural role in sparking the civil rights movement, Rosenberg notes a few facts. The Brown decision led to essentially no greater press coverage of civil rights in major media-- that only happened beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He marshalls pretty strong evidence that, even in the black community, few of them even knew about it for years, since it's effects were so limited. The black press was far more interested in Emmett Till murder, and polls of blacks themselves in the 1960s attributed their new militancy to being inspired by the sit-ins, pickets and marches, not by the Supreme Court decisions.
Interestingly, there were more civil rights demonstrations in four of the years in the 1940s than some years in the late 1950s. It's hard to see a pattern of demostrations that marks the 1954 decision as a bellweather.
And notably, Martin Luther King Jr. thought court cases were bad for the movement, an issue that led to lots of conflicts with the NAACP. "Whenever it is possible," MLK said in 1957, "we want to avoid courts cases in this integration struggle."
One small cultural point-- but probably not insignicant-- almost no civil rights songs ever mentioned Brown v. Board. They mentioned local and national politicians and other events, but not the courts.
It's also worth emphasizing that a far more important thing happened in the 1950s to inspire black Americans to self-determination than the Supreme Court. Black African nations were achieving independence in large numbers, stirring a new sense of power and the right to freedom than ever before.
Rosenberg marshalls a hell of a lot of evidence that not only did Brown accomplish little, it allowed southern racists to frame their resistance to civil rights as a populist rebellion against the "elitist Supreme Court" (doing nothing in actual reality), hardening and strengthening racist white resistance.
Rosenberg has one of the toughest views on all of this, maybe even a bit tougher than me, but the point is that Brown is singled out as a major cause of the civil rights movement when many other, far more important factors, were brewing a major civil rights movement in the country.
>Meanwhile we can do ijmportant things in the courts, The CCR and the ACLU
>just puta big dent in the Patriot Act, for example -- by a
>lawsuit. It would be
>good if we vould get the sucker legislatively repealed, but
>mewnhwile we shoulda
>lso atack it in the courts.
Maybe-- we'll see what happens in practice. And let's note something. A large part of what the Court said was that what the White House was doing was not authorized by the Patriot Act. If Congress had itself suspended habeous corpus and authorized Gitmo, it's not clear that the Court would have come to the same conclusion.
A proper role of the courts is to bar the executive branch from acting without legislative authority. I've never said courts don't have a role, and just interpreting the law and making sure the government does only what has been authorized is a tremendous restraint on abuse.
>Nathan, to whom I owe an apology for an intemperate outburst, is a
>bit of an all-or-nothing thinker.
>The courts are utterly useless, stay out of them. The economiy is
>the only important issue,
>forget sexuality (for one). Seems to me that we need more nuance and
>sensitivity to context.
Since I work in the legal field, the first sentence that I say "stay out of the courts" completely is ridiculous. Courts are used all the time to ENFORCE rights that have been legislatively approved. The only use of the courts I am arguing against is constitutional social engineering. As for me believing the economy is the only important issue, that is again a ridiculous statement-- I've spent years of my life fighting around immigrant rights, affirmative action, welfare reform. raised tens of thousands of dollars for pro-choice groups. Yes, my primary focus as been on economic and labor issues, and I'll defend that as a key area that progressives need to build political strength in order to succeed in the rest of politics. But to say I see it as the only issue is a reductionist libel itself.
Nathan